To celebrate New Year’s Eve in 2017, German authorities sounded more like the vice cops who roam the streets of a few Muslim-majority nations: They created safety zones for women in order to protect them from the thousands of Muslim men who descend on such festivities like packs of wolves looking for prey. Memories of what happened in Cologne in 2015, when something like 1,200 women were sexually assaulted and robbed in the heart of the city, had traumatized a nation—indeed a continent—that was already in the process of figuring out how to deal with the disruptive powers of Islamic traditions that are, for the most part, alien and antithetical to modern European values.
For decades now, at least since the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses unleashed Muslim furor, with the sword of the Iranian Ayatollah dangling dangerously close to the heart of the West, Europeans have been living in a state of extreme fear, undercutting their own hard-earned traditions of freedom of speech by increasingly refusing to publish or release anything that would offend Muslim sensibilities. When an imam could publicly declare on Dutch radio that Muslims are duty-bound to kill those who resist their religion’s call; when cartoonists who choose to depict Islam’s prophet are assassinated in broad daylight; when innocent pedestrians are run over with trucks and tourist areas are thrown into turmoil; when the laissez-faire French and Dutch suddenly find themselves consumed by endless political polemics involving headscarves, burqas and burkinis; when metropolitan London becomes more homophobic than Britain’s rural provinces because of its Muslim population; when Muslims in Britain would rather fight for ISIS than their own nation’s armed forces; when pubs are forced to close because they find themselves in Muslim-majority communities; and when the European joie de vivre is threatened by terrorists in Madrid, Paris, and London, we can easily understand the agony of liberal European elites.They want to save refugees and welcome immigrants but, when they do so, they end up undermining their own social values.
